


Where Saint Petersburg Stood

by gayboy



Series: The Sufferings of Sasha Pavlovitch [2]
Category: 18th Century CE RPF, 19th Century CE France RPF, 19th Century CE RPF, Historical RPF, Napoleonic Era RPF, Political RPF - Russian 19th c.
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Broken Engagement, Childhood Trauma, Divorce, Everyone Is Gay, F/M, Healing, Infidelity, M/M, Other, Past Infidelity, Siblings, Unresolved Emotional Tension, Unresolved Tension
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-02-24
Updated: 2018-03-29
Packaged: 2019-03-23 06:11:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 14,244
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13781418
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gayboy/pseuds/gayboy
Summary: “Twenty-three-year-old Sasha was an idiot, really!” exclaimed twenty-six-year-old Sasha in what seemed to Klemens to be an overly matter-of-fact tone. “I know it, you know it, and even Arthur knows it. Two years after the fact, the healing process has only started.You don't need to have read The Sufferings of Sasha Pavlovitch to read this.





	1. Two Years Later

**Author's Note:**

> Well, I'm back, with another, equally (if not more) saucy installment in this epic saga.
> 
> At the end of The Sufferings of Sasha Pavlovitch, Leo is heartbroken over Sasha's cheating on him with Klemens, Klemens is still married and awaiting the birth of his daughter, and Sasha and Arthur decide to remain just friends. This is two years later.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Back at it again.

               “Twenty-three-year-old Sasha was an idiot, really!” exclaimed twenty-six-year-old Sasha in what seemed to Klemens to be an overly matter-of-fact tone. “I know it, you know it, and even Arthur knows it.” He drummed his fingers lightly on his kitchen table as he ranted and watched Klemens try to fill out an English crossword puzzle.

            “What’s a Portuguese-speaking African country with the letter Q?” Klemens tried to complete crossword puzzle every morning before going to work, because he felt as though they kept his English from becoming rusty. More often than not, however, he enlisted Sasha’s help to complete them.

            “Equatorial Guinea?”

            “Too long.”

            After thinking for another few seconds, Sasha came up with, “Uh, Mozambique? What is it called in English?”

            “Just Mozambique,” answered Klemens. He changed the subject and looked up from his paper for a second, lifting his reading glasses when he looked at Sasha. “You know, I was your age now when I met you, and I didn’t think you were an idiot. I mean, now I can look back on the past and think to myself about what idiots we were back then, but then again, it’s probably difficult to find someone who _doesn’t_ want to strangle their past selves.”

            “Sometimes I feel like an eighty-year-old Peruvian woman trapped in the body of a twenty-six-year-old Russian man. And you’re, like, a normal thirty-year-old German man.”

            “I know I always say this,” said Klemens, “and it’s quite honestly ridiculous that I have to correct you at this point, but I’m Austrian. You do know that, right?”

            “You know I only say that because it pisses you off.”

            Sighing, Klemens returned to his crossword puzzle. Their mornings usually went like this, with the two of them doing the crossword puzzle and having a conversation over breakfast. Shortly thereafter, Klemens left to go to work at his law firm, and later on, Sasha fed Alexander der Groß, their cat, and either went to his job at the library or to his classes depending on which day it was. Although their words and actions didn’t always advertise the fact or make it imminently clear in the least, they remained deeply in love. And although they had only been truly committed to each other since Klemens’s recent divorce, they were simply inseparable. Even to those who thought they were nothing but _very_ close friends could hardly imagine one existing without the other, and indeed, they sometimes referred to each other as “husband” because that’s precisely what role each played in the other’s life.

            What had happened was that Klemens’s wife left him, and he left her. Their lives at the point of their divorce had been so separated that the conversation of what went where and who got what was a short one, and for everything and all the wrongs that had driven them apart, they were still on fairly good terms. Eleonore had custody of the children, but Klemens, not wanting to be as terrible of a father as he had been a husband, jetted off to Austria to see them as often as he could. It wasn’t often enough as he would have liked, but enough that his son and daughter seemed to acknowledge that he was making the effort. He and Eleonore decided that neither of them would ever know that the reason that they divorced was that he took a male lover, and that when they grew old enough to ask the fundamental question of _why_ , both of them would keep it simple and say that it just hadn’t been working out.

            In Klemens’s life right now, everything was perfectly fine. It wasn’t _perfect_ , but it was fine. And he, too, was fine with that.

\---

            Today was a work day for Sasha, as it was the middle of the summer and he didn’t start classes again for another month or so. He no longer worked at _La République_ , the art-studio-turned-coffee-place where he spent his early twenties wondering whether to quit or not. Instead, after having mastered the art of the Dewey decimal system, he became an assistant librarian at one of Quebec City’s many public libraries, and planned to become a full-fledged librarian after finishing his master’s degree, which, considering that hadn’t even finished his bachelor’s degree at this point, was still a long way ahead of him. He didn’t _need_ the work, as he had basically inherited his grandmother Catherine’s entire fortune when he turned twenty-five a year and a half ago, but he knew that without this sense of purpose, he would merely waste away into nothingness. In any case, he enjoyed the work and was even friends with many of his colleagues.

            On this particular day he was responsible for organizing all of the unlabeled books in the library’s storage, a tedious task which nobody bothered to do more than once a year. Despite Sasha’s great love for books and literature, he wasted away in the windowless, lightless jail cell of the storage room. All of the books which sat here hadn’t been read for years, let alone decades, and not even the bright, hard replacement covers which protected their yellow pages could mask their ages. In the storage room, decades of literature and ideas swirled together into a tedious nothingness which Sasha could neither understand nor ascribe. Perhaps, had he been in the mood to discover and rejuvenate, he would have been able to breathe some life into the pages that crumbled with the slightest touch, but after all, this was just work. So, he organized the unlabeled books letter by letter until he simply couldn’t take it anymore and stepped back into the main, animated area of the library where the words surrounding him were more than merely tidbits of potential energy waiting to spring.

            There, typing into the computer at the front desk, stood Friedrich Wilhelm, a librarian and Sasha’s friend. Friedrich was slightly self-conscious about the fact that he was a librarian, because he all-too-well fit the stereotype of loving silence. Ever since he had received surgery on his right ear a year ago, the smallest clatter or burst of noise pained him, and his unimposing, shy figure didn’t help him in any way to be assertive. Despite this hatred for noise, however, Sasha’s soft voice caused Sasha to be one of the few people whom Friedrich could speak to for extended periods of time without wincing, and for this, both of them were thankful.

            Friedrich was, quite frankly, one of Sasha’s favorite people, and one of the few people whom he would consider to be a close friend. Sasha was also certain that Friedrich adored him, even though Friedrich was, of course, quiet about it. Their friendship was so sweet that before their coworkers found out that Sasha was actually with Klemens, they constantly made jokes about what an awesome couple he and Friedrich would make. Understandably, however, Sasha actually being gay kind of ruined the joke. Oh, well.

            As he heard the door to the storage room open and close behind him, Friedrich turned around to find a weary Sasha standing exasperated behind him. “Good morning, Sasha,” he said.

            “Good morning, Friedrich. Organizing the storage room certainly sucks the life out of you.”

            “Others have often called it boring, to say the least.”

            “So you’ve never had to do it?”

            “No.” Friedrich was so shy that he rarely, if ever, used personal pronouns. Sasha couldn’t for the life of him figure out how he managed to forego them altogether.

            “Because all of the books are unlabeled, it’s impossible to finish them all in one day.”

            “Perhaps that’s why no one’s ever done it before. The library keeps the old books because they’re all impossibly old and even valuable, but that value has no worth when nobody bothers to look at them more than once a year. And then, when people decide to read them, the words just crumble away.”

            Sasha thought that Friedrich was making an incredibly deep statement about words losing their meaning when taken out of the context in which they were written, when in reality Friedrich was literally just talking about the pages becoming so dry that they lost all pliability. “It’s sad,” he said. “When I was in high school, we sorted through a whole lot of books like this, and we ended up finding one that had notes in it from some famous Russian general.”

            “And what came of it?”

            “Absolutely nothing. It’s probably still sitting on a shelf, untouched and unread. It’s a good memory, at the very least.” He had so very few good memories from living in Saint Petersburg that recalling this one, which he hadn’t thought of in years, jolted him internally.

            Sasha grew quiet after that, and a few seconds after the end of the conversation, Friedrich went back to work. Friedrich didn’t understand why and didn’t particularly care to, but Sasha was always _weird_ when it came to his childhood or Saint Petersburg. Whenever it came to this, he simply continued on with his work and let Sasha think to himself.

            ‘ _That seems like a_ you _problem,’_ he thought as he continued to work and said nothing.

\---

            Sasha didn’t come home until later that night, on account of his habitual wandering whenever he was bored, and furthermore, it was a Monday. Klemens’s cello was missing from the place in their bedroom where it usually sat when he wasn’t playing it, and the lack of the usual weight on the carpet left an oddly-shaped indent in the floor. On Mondays, Klemens normally took his cello to his boss’s house, where he played as his boss played the violin. Sasha wasn’t sure how or when their duo started, but he had heard them a few times, and they were quite good. However, this meant that on most Monday nights, he was completely alone, and seldom knew what to do with his time.

            On this particular night, he picked up his cell phone and dialed Caroline Bonaparte, his friend who he _knew_ must have been in town over the summer. After a few rings, she picked up her cell phone.

            “ _Hello?”_ she said. “ _Sasha? Did you ever learn how to send a text?”_

_“_ No,” answered Sasha, who was used to backlash for his preference of phone calls over text messages. “Do you want to come over?”

            “ _Is Klemens there?”_

            “No.”

            “ _Oh, okay.”_ Although she tried not to, she couldn’t help but let her feeling of disappointment leech into her words. Caroline had had a massive crush on Klemens since the day they first met, and despite her attempts to hide it, it was all but obvious. Sasha knew about it, Klemens knew about it, her brother knew about it, and even Arthur knew about it, and he barely even knew her. It was, all in all, an uncomfortable situation.

            “You can pet our cat,” offered Sasha. “And I’ll make you dinner.” He was very desperate.

            “ _Yeah, okay, I’ll come over.”_

            “Okay, I’ll see you soon.” And he hung up the phone.

            Caroline was only four years younger than Sasha, but on account of the fact that he had once dated her older brother who often treated her as if he were her parent, he also tended to think of her more as his daughter than anything else. Caroline herself often said that since the breakup two years ago, she felt like the child of parents whose bond had ended in an ugly divorce.

            About half an hour after the phone call, Sasha heard a knock at the door, and opened it to see Klemens carrying his cello case on his back. Klemens stepped inside their apartment, being very careful to not let his cello strike the door frame. He then took the case off of his back and laid it sideways on the ground by the wall.

            “Klemens,” said Sasha, admiring the other man from behind. “You’re home early.”

            “Yeah, we didn’t lose track of time this time. I wanted to be home early.” After setting his cello down, he walked towards Sasha and kissed him.

            After the kiss was over, Sasha said, “I thought you were going to be home later, so I invited Caroline over.”

            “Oh, okay. That’s fine.”

            “That doesn’t make you uncomfortable?”

            “I mean, _I’m_ not the one who’s weird about it. I don’t _like_ the fact that she’s basically in love with me...”

            “Come on, it’s not _that_ bad.”

            “Would you like it if _my_ older sister was in love with you?”

            Sasha was taken aback. “Wait, what?”

            “What?”

            “I didn’t know you had an older sister.”

            “Yeah…” Klemens looked slightly uncomfortable, which was uncharacteristic of him. “As you may have imagined by now, we’re not really that close.”

            Sasha had never thought a lot about Klemens’s family before and quite frankly never imagined him as really _having_ a family outside of his ex-wife and daughter and son, but now that he thought about it for the first time, it didn’t really make sense for Klemens to just have burst out of the ground one day, fully-formed, like Venus. He couldn’t believe that in the four years he knew Klemens, Klemens had never talked about his family before.

            “Do you hate each other or something?” Sasha asked, thinking about his relationship with his own brother.

            To this, Klemens shook his head. “We’re just not really friends.”

            “What do you mean?”

            “We don’t talk. The last time I talked to her was probably at my wedding.”

            “Why?”

            “Because we’re not close.”

            “Do you really not hate each other?”

            “No.” He was beginning to get a little bit fed-up with Sasha’s rapid succession of questions about his sister, when he _really_ didn’t think that the dynamics of their relationship were particularly interesting or important.

            Another knock at the door. This time, it was certainly Caroline, and Sasha went to go answer it, vowing to finish this conversation later, while Klemens left to go change into more comfortable clothing.

            Caroline looked the same as she always did, but in the past year or so, she had really begun to look more mature and more like an adult who knew what she was doing than an adolescent unsure of herself and her decisions. She actively tried to surround herself with this adultlike air, but no matter how wise she attempted to make herself seem, her round face and sparkling eyes betrayed her superficial sense of wisdom. One never would have guessed from her youthful and lovely appearance that she possessed the capability of malignance in her heart, or that she was in any way prone to debauchery. It had been so long since she took advantage of her scheming nature that even Sasha, who knew her well, had forgotten about it.

            “Hey, Sasha!” she said when she saw him. She hugged him for a few seconds before letting go of him, and as Sasha closed the door behind her, even Alexander der Groß slinked out from some darkened corner of the room to greet her by rubbing himself against her legs. “… and hello to my favorite Alexander,” she mumbled as she picked up the black cat and held him.

            “You know,” said Sasha, walking into the kitchen with Caroline, “we actually discovered a few weeks ago that Alexander der Groß is a female cat.”

            “How did you figure that out?” She set him down and he ran back into the living room. “You’ve had him for a few years, right?”

            “ _Klemens_ has had him for a few years, but it turns out that he didn’t read the adoption papers carefully enough.”

            Caroline pulled out one of the kitchen chairs and sat down on it. “Isn’t his job literally to read things very carefully. Like, doesn’t he get paid for doing exactly that?”

            “That’s basically what I said. Go figure, right?” At just that moment, Klemens walked in. “Speak of the devil.”

            “Hey, Caroline,” Klemens greeted, and Caroline, checking him out in the process, greeted him back. “So,” he started, “you guys were talking about me?”

            “Just about how you didn’t know that Alexander der Groß is a girl until a few weeks ago,” answered Sasha.

            “To be fair, he had already gotten fixed when I adopted him, and in any case, he’s a _cat_ and couldn’t care less.”

            “We were making fun of you because you make a living from reading things carefully,” Caroline added.

            Klemens rolled his eyes. “Sasha’s a librarian, and you’d be ashamed to look at the organizational state of his collection.” As much as he enjoyed casual banter, he wasn’t about to take shit for something as ridiculous as this. “So,” he changed subjects, “you still work at that that place, Caroline?”

            “Yeah, it kind of sucks, but I get paid pretty well, so it’s fine. Next year is my last year of college, though, so I want to find a job before I graduate that _isn’t_ terrible.”

            “That’s an important thing to do.” Klemens thought that maintaining the appearance of having no vested interest in Caroline’s personal pursuits would cause her to lose her interest in him, hence the ambiguity of his line of inquiry.

            Sasha wanted to tell Klemens to stop being a dick, but unfortunately, there was no way to do this without attracting Caroline’s attention as well. In an attempt to stop Klemens from further being an asshole, he changed the conversation topic to his own day at work and sorting the books in the storage room, and the evening went on without another hitch.

\---

            When Caroline left at about nine in the evening, Sasha closed the door as she left. “You know,” he said to Klemens, “I don’t like the way that you treat Caroline.”

            Klemens stopped him in front of the door. “You _know_ that I like her and that I think she’s a really nice girl, but I really want to drive the point home that I will _never_ like her and that she needs to be interested in people her own age.”

            “And I know that, but…” Sasha sighed. “She clearly isn’t getting it, so when you dismiss whatever she says, you’re kind of just showing her that it’s okay for men to ignore her feelings.”

            “You’re so paternal when it comes to her.” Klemens didn’t intend this as an insult, but both of them knew that it was simply true. Sasha’s tendency to treat Caroline as his daughter was one of the few aspects of his personality that had remained consistent with the person he had been when he first met her.

            “Just please be nice to her, okay? For me.”

            “Okay, I’ll be nice to her.” It was rare that Sasha had a serious request for him, so he knew that this was really very important to the other man. He took a couple of steps to where Sasha was standing, stood on his toes, and kissed him. “I love you, you know,” he mumbled.

            “I know,” said Sasha, holding Klemens’s hands. “So,” he started, “as we were talking about before, you have a sister?”

            “Have I really never told you about my family before?”

            “You never really talk about your life before you went to college.”

            “There’s really not a lot to say.” Klemens looked away. “My childhood and family were pretty average, and not nearly as interesting as yours.”

            Sasha wanted to say that his family and childhood were “pretty average” too, but he knew that that was simply not the case. As a result of his tumultuous childhood and the terrible relationship between his parents and his grandmother Catherine, who raised him and his brother Kostya, he had become permanently estranged from everyone in his family except for Kostya (even his mother refused to speak to him), and seriously doubted that that would change at any point in the future. The fact that three members of his immediate family, his father and two sisters, had died in the past three years certainly didn’t help lift the permanent strain on their family in any way. Sasha wasn’t himself sure how it had gotten to this point, but the point of no return was probably gone before he was even alive.

“Fine,” he replied, “but that doesn’t mean I don’t want to _know_ about it. You know more about me right now than I know about you” Letting go of Klemens’s hands, he walked away from the back of the door and went to go straighten out the living room. Klemens followed him, and with a sigh, began to recount what his own, utterly average past had been like.

  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If I seem desperate for comments it's because I am.
> 
> Discussion question: Is Klemens right to be mean to Caroline?


	2. Old Habits Die Hard

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After Leo finished his cigarette, he went back inside and closed the door to the balcony. He took the glove off of his left hand and tossed it onto the table with them. After glancing at his laptop and books on the table, he then decided that perhaps he did need a real break not just a few minutes or hours long, but for enough time that he could forget about all that plagued him. He needed to get away from the revolving door that constituted his life and daily routine, and the more he thought about it, the more he realized how long he had been due for such a change in scenery.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello, it's me again, publishing two chapters at the same time because the first two chapters are really just the introduction.

It was in the living room, where all of their important conversations took place, that Klemens first told Sasha about his past and childhood. Because it was still peak summer, despite it being the evening, soft light filtered through the translucent curtains and signaled that the sunset was approaching. The orange light made Klemens’s dark hair frame shine and frame his delicate face as he spoke. Sasha thought to capture that moment’s serenity in a photo, but he understood trying to capture the sheer loveliness in a photograph would have been all but futile.

“My childhood really wasn’t anything special,” iterated Klemens for the fifth time that day. “My father is a diplomat and my mother is a socialite. My mother’s side of the family is wealthy, so as far as I can recall, we never really had to struggle. I grew up in the Rhineland, so I grew up speaking German and French, and to be honest, to this day I still feel that I can express myself _much_ more clearly in French than in German. I have an older sister and a younger brother, although we’re not close in the slightest, and I really believe that we’re going to completely fall out of contact once my parents die.”

He paused and looked back at Sasha and added, “And we don’t hate each other. We were just never really friends and never had similar interests.

“But anyway, I went to a Catholic school where I was never really popular girls, and I was a pretty good swimmer at the local swim club. Over the summers, my father would take me and my sister wherever he needed to go for work, and from then on I knew that I wanted to either be a lawyer or a diplomat.”

“Who would have guessed, right?” interjected Sasha.

“Exactly. And then, after graduating high school, I went to college in Strasbourg, where I studied international politics and French, which kind of exacerbated the disparity of my French skills and my German skills. I met Eleonore von Kaunitz right after I graduated, and we married during my second year of law school in the Rhineland. Her parents _really_ didn’t like me and decided that I could only marry her under a certain set of conditions, one of them being that she couldn’t come overseas with me if _I_ decided to live overseas. We had an open relationship for a while and trusted each other not to fall in love with anyone else, but then I met you, and you know the rest of the story.”

Right. The story ended there, because Klemens still couldn’t bring himself to admit how badly he had wronged Eleonore, in how many ways he had wronged her. They had fallen in love with each other at the cost of hurting everyone around them, including themselves. Perhaps Sasha’s love with Leo had, in the beginning, been one of pulchritude, and perhaps Klemens’s disastrous marriage with Eleonore had been lovely until the very end, but both of them felt deeply in their hearts that their love for each other emerged on a foundation of lies and bitterness, and there was no avoiding this fact. If the end justified the means, then no doubt was this worth it, but considering all and everyone that both of them had sacrificed to be together, the evil in their relationship seemed to outweigh the love itself. Now, however, the thought of associating anything less than sublime with Klemens’s name would never have crossed Sasha’s mind, and if it did, it would soon have died out in the cloyingly sentimental wasteland of his heart.

\---

The sun had almost set by the time that Caroline made it home to the apartment that she shared over the summers with her older brother and Sasha’s ex-boyfriend, Leo.

‘ _I hope Napoleone isn’t in his bedroom banging someone… actually, I kind of hope he is, because he needs a new hobby,’_ she thought as she stepped into the nauseatingly clean apartment. To her surprise, however, she saw Leo nowhere, and instead only saw his books and closed laptop on the coffee table. It wasn’t until she spotted the closed white curtains of the sliding glass door softly blowing inwards that she realized that he was on the balcony, and decided to accompany him.

Leo stood at the edge of the balcony, leaning on the thin metal railing and holding a lit cigarette in his gloved left hand. The fading image of the sunset so engrossed him that he didn’t notice Caroline’s presence until she spoke to him.

“What are you doing?” she asked. She expected that her sudden words would startle her brother, but to her surprise, he didn’t flinch.

Without turning to look at her, he just answered, “I’m taking a break.” For the past two years or so, he had begun to work on his Ph.D in physics, and between that and teaching some classes at the university, it was rare that he had any time to himself.

“You _never_ smoke here.” It was true; ever since Leo had once again picked up his old habit of smoking, he always went behind the building or in one of the alleyways beside it. Smoking on the balcony was a first.

Caroline continued, “You need a life outside of working, Napoleone. You haven’t even been on a date since…” She stopped there; they both knew what the _since_ referred to.

Without turning to face Caroline, Leo rolled his eyes. “Not everything is about dating, you know, and in any case, that’s not even true.”

“Oh, really?” she tried to counter, but it was no use. He remained silent and didn’t say anything else until she left, at which point he felt relieved, if anything.

Leo wasn’t bitter about it, he really wasn’t. In the past two years, he had learned to live with himself more comfortably than ever before, and in the process, he had even accepted his loneliness. Despite his propensity to lie about his personal affairs, what he had told Caroline was true; there were people she had no idea that he had been with, people who now regretted him and people with whom it was difficult to even hold a formal, professional relationship after the fact. All of them had been nothing but dirty, gritty, and emotional, although it was never _him_ who conducted any flagrant displays of emotion. He merely incited them.

            In recent times, had also begun to carry a deep-seated resentfulness towards the fact that out of all of his siblings, it was  _ Caroline _ who had come to live with him. If only it was Caroline who had married at nineteen, and Pauline who had come in her place! He knew that he should have felt ashamed of himself that despite everything, Caroline wasn’t his favorite sibling or even his favorite  _ sister _ , but given her constant criticisms on his very state of being, at the same time he felt that there was absolutely nothing to be ashamed about. Merely coexisting, then, was enough for them both.

After Leo finished his cigarette, he went back inside and closed the door to the balcony. He took the glove off of his left hand and tossed it onto the table with them. After glancing at his laptop and books on the table, he then decided that perhaps he _did_ need a real break not just a few minutes or hours long, but for enough time that he could forget about all that plagued him. He needed to get away from the revolving door that constituted his life and daily routine, and the more he thought about it, the more he realized how long he had been due for such a change in scenery.

After considering it for a few minutes, he opened his laptop and, without hesitation, booked a flight to Paris two months from now, at the beginning of August. He then called to Caroline, who was in her room, “ _Caroline, I’m spending the weekend in Montréal!”_

_“Is it for a hand thing?”_ Caroline asked from behind her door.

“ _No.”_

“ _Can I come?”_ she called back.

“ _No.”_

\---

Leo arrived in Montréal on Friday evening when Giuseppina was out performing and only her housemate, Georgina, was at their shared flat near downtown. Giuseppina had told him that she performed every evening that he was there, so it came as no surprise to him when Georgina greeted him instead. After he had put his things in their tiny spare bedroom which was probably originally a closet, she offered him a drink, and he politely declined.

“You must be tired,” she said to him after he refused. “Would you like some tea?”

“No, thank you, Georgina.” After Sasha left him, he no longer found tea particularly palatable.

“Coffee?”                                                                 

“I’ll take some coffee.” Every time he met her in this apartment, it always went like this— she offered him a drink, which he always declined, and then coffee, or tea, or something else which he accepted. He watched as Georgina pressed the hot liquid and poured it into two cups. Leo dumped about five sugar cubes into his coffee and stirred carefully before he took a single sip.

“Are you sure that’s enough sugar?” asked Georgina. She had been somewhat cautious of him the first few times they had met, but at this point she knew that Leo was more childish than anything else, even if he couldn’t see it himself.

“Yeah, it’s enough,” replied Leo. “You know, I haven’t seen you in a while.”

“Giuseppina didn’t tell me that you were coming until yesterday, but when I found out you were, I cancelled my plans.” Georgina and Leo had had definite chemistry with each other since the first time they met, and even now it was no secret that they were interested in each other. They didn’t _talk_ about it, per se, but still, it was no secret.

“And for that, I’m certainly thankful.” He reached out, took Georgina’s warm hand in his own, and kissed it softly.

By the time that Giuseppina was done with her show and finally made it home, Leo and Georgina were in Georgina’s bedroom, having done the act and trying to think of what to say to each other.

“The actress and the physicist being together sounds like a cheap joke, but here we are,” said Leo as he carefully buttoned up the buttons of her flannel shirt. When she hardly reacted to this, he remarked, “You don’t seem too amused, Georgina.”

“It’s not that,” she said. “I’m just tired, really.”

He sat on the bed next to her after he was done fixing her shirt and put on his own clothes again. “What have you done today?”

Yawning, Georgina answered, “Nothing much today. Yesterday and the day before, though, I auditioned, and tomorrow I have to give voice lessons.”

“What did you audition for?”

“ _Iphigénie_.”

“By Racine? Isn’t that an old one? _”_

She was actually surprised that Leo knew the play. “Yeah,” she nodded. “You know it?”

“When I was younger, I read a lot of works about philosophy. I would have easily defended Voltaire to my death.”

“I started acting when I was fifteen, and after that, I just never had the time to read anything but plays.”

“But you understand them better than anyone, I’m sure.”

“That may very well be true.” Georgina smiled. “And in any case, I don’t like reading very much, so it doesn’t really bother me.”

At that moment, both of them heard a knocking coming from the door of the flat, presumably from Giuseppina.

“Doesn’t she have a key?” asked Leo.

“Our door is so old that the lock takes a few minutes to open at the very least, and our landlady won’t fix it,” said Georgina as she got up to go open the door, but he stopped her.

“I can do it.”

“Alright. If she asks, tell Giuseppina that I’m going to sleep.”

“Goodnight.”

“Goodnight, Napoleon.”

Leo stood up, closed Georgina’s door behind him, and fiddled with the lock of the door for a few seconds until it opened. He opened the door, and Giuseppina came in, looking more exhausted than he had ever seen her before. However, despite her evident fatigue, she greeted him warmly.

“Leo!” she exclaimed as she smiled and hugged him.

“It’s good to see you, Giuseppina, but I understand if you just want to sleep and talk tomorrow. I’m sure you’re exhausted.”

As she shook her head, her dark curls bounced around her face and shoulders. When he looked closely, Leo could see that she hadn’t yet wiped off all of her stage makeup, and the residue of mascara and eye shadow were smeared around her eyes. “No,” she said. “I haven’t seen you in weeks, and I’m fine at least for another hour. I only look this bad because I ran out of makeup wipes and I didn’t want to ask anyone else because I have some here, anyway.”

She went into the living room and sprawled out in the armchair next to the sofa. Leo took the end of the sofa and asked, “So, how have you been?”

“Good, honestly. What about you?”

“The usual. How’s Talma doing?” Francois Joseph Talma was another Montréal actor and friends with Giuseppina and Georgina, so by a matter of association he had become a close friend of Leo as well.

“He’s alright,” Giuseppina shrugged. “We haven’t seen him in a while, though.”

“Me neither.”

She changed the subject. “Is staying with me and MJ for a couple of days your idea of a summer vacation? Or are you here for work?” MJ was Giuseppina’s nickname for Georgina (whose real name, of course, was Marguerite-Joséphine), and while Leo’s Ph.D work and professorial work was his day job, “work” referred to his night job.

Leo was, as of late, a part-time hand model, and people paid him considerable sums of money to take pictures of him holding things. Slender with long, tapered fingers, his hands resembled a beautiful woman’s. So, about once or twice a month, he visited a small studio in Quebec City to take pictures with his hands, and about once every two months, he came to Montréal to do the same. Although this wasn’t the path that Leo had hoped to take in life, the money that he made certainly made the end of the month much more comfortable than it had been before.

“No,” Leo answered. “I’m not here for work.”

“Do you ever get embarrassed to tell people that you live a secret double life as a hand model?”

“You think I _tell_ people?” Both of them laughed. “So do _you_ ever get a break?”

“Not really. I could take a break if I wanted to, but that would mean not getting paid, and Montréal is more expensive than Quebec City. Whenever I have a couple of days off, I basically just go and see Arthur, or he comes here.”

“It’s always nice when you come visit, you know. It reminds me of how thankful I am that we don’t live in that terrible house anymore.”

The two of them kept on talking for another half an hour before both of them retired to their respective beds, and Leo actually felt satisfied with the way the day had gone.

Leo arrived home on Monday morning to an empty apartment and all of his and Caroline’s things exactly in the same places that they had been when he left on Friday. Every time he returned from Montréal, all he could think about was how utterly placid and even meaningless his life seemed when he compared it to that of Giuseppina and Georgina, and it was only during these times that he thought about how badly he wanted something to _change_ or how badly he wanted something exciting to happen. The feeling of wistfulness soon dissipated, however, as he came to his senses and began to see that this was the life he had chosen for himself, and this was the life he would have unless something beyond his means forced him to snap out of it.

Setting down his bags, he went outside to smoke a cigarette.

\---

Arthur couldn’t stand living next to him. Arthur and Leo, the two of them had been next door neighbors for three years now, and although they had known each other through thick and thin at this point, their relationship was worse than it ever had been before. While they hated each other before, they could at least have conversations with each other, but the way they felt towards each other now was so utterly scathing and toxic that oftentimes, it was difficult to be in the same room. While this unfortunate development was Arthur’s fault more than anyone else’s, he would rather walk to hell and back before he admitted it.

What made Arthur dwell so heavily on Leo’s existence _now_ was that, and he had heard from Giuseppina, Leo was banging her housemate. Although neither Leo or Georgina had ever so much as mentioned their affair to Giuseppina in any capacity, it didn’t matter— she picked up on these things ridiculously quickly, and seldom was she ever wrong. This bothered Arthur. Then again, the mere fact that Leo breathed on this planet bothered him, but the fact that Leo was _banging_ his girlfriend’s _housemate_ felt like a targeted affront to him personally. God, he couldn’t stand anything about that man, now more than ever!

For Arthur, the couple of years of his life when he decided to explore his sexuality and remain single had gone over badly, as he couldn’t get a single man to remain interested in him for more than a couple of months at a time. The reason for this eluded him, and it’s possible that there was none. In fact, if he had simply kept on going at it, he would have found a suitable partner within another couple of months, but that part of his life was _well_ over and done with. When he turned thirty-three, he began to fear that he would never marry if he didn’t take the initiative now, and began to date Giuseppina again. He never told her why he had broken up with her in the first place or who he had been seeing for the past two years. She was the only one who didn’t know that any of this had happened.

When he hung up the phone after talking to her, he sighed. There was nothing for him to do, no emotion for him to express but through that sigh of desperation, exhaustion, and perhaps a tiny but of envy— though, of course, he would never admit to it. As he dressed himself, drank his morning tea, and picked up his leather briefcase to head to the lab, he kept thinking, but he didn’t know what he was thinking about. The feeling of having to go to work on a summer morning washed over him.

‘ _I’ve already thought all of the things there are to think about this,’_ he thought, and decided to leave the idea alone. But throughout the day, something about it continued to itch at his soul, and he had no choice but to let his worn-out, fatigued concerns run through his mind again.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please don't forget to comment because I'm motivated largely through external forces and comments and feedback really give me the drive to keep writing.
> 
> Discussion question: What do you think of Leo's attitude towards Caroline given the way that she treats him?


	3. A Lot of Stuff Happens

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Hello?” Sasha asked. “Kostya?” He hadn’t spoken any Russian in months, and he feared that he would struggle to find the right words even to converse with his brother.
> 
> "Oh, good, I didn’t think you would be awake,” said Kostya.
> 
> “So, why are you calling me?”
> 
> “I wanted to know if I could come over.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Long time, no update. I have been busy but now that speech season is over I'll have more time to do writing and stuff.

 Days passed and hours passed. Minutes scurried by, and nothing changed. Sasha’s routine was set in stone at this point, which allowed him a peace of mind that he hadn’t felt for the past three years. Tea and crossword puzzles abounded in the well-loved house where he lived.

            One day, about an hour before the library closed, Arthur came in, not because he particularly felt like spending time with Sasha, but he was well-aware that that would be one of the consequences of visiting the library. On that particular day, Sasha was at the library’s main desk helping the sparse group of people who decided to visit the institution on Wednesday evenings, so Arthur figured that if anything, the other man would be  _ lucky _ to have his company.

            When Sasha looked up from the desk and saw Arthur approaching him, he nodded and greeted his friend by saying, “Arthur, what’s up?” Both of them had mostly forgotten about the few weeks when they were briefly interested in each other. Sasha tried to shove those memories out of his mind as much as possible, and Arthur chalked it up to Sasha being upset and emotionally confused after his messy breakup with Leo. Now, once again as always, they were nothing but good friends, and they quickly and uncomfortably changed the subject the few times that it  _ did _ come up.

            Arthur nodded back at Sasha as if to say hello, and took a second to look at him to see if anything about his appearance had changed since the last time they met. Sasha’s appearance always seemed to be changing these days. For a brief period of a few months he had stopped wearing glasses until he decided that he hated wearing contact lenses and went back to his thick black frames, he had gotten both of his ears pierced along with one side of his nose, and some tattoos were visible on his arms depending on what length of sleeves he wore that day. Today, Arthur could see the watercolor delphiniums snaking their way up his left forearm before disappearing behind the fabric of his rolled-up sleeves.

            “It’s been a while,” said Sasha.

            “It’s been three days.”

            “You’re not a very good conversationalist, are you?”

            “No.” It was true; the more time Sasha spent with him, the more he began to notice that Arthur’s speech had the tendency to be monosyllabic, ripe with expletives, and to the point.

            “Can I help you with anything? This is my job, you know.”

            “Right…” Despite the fact that he was condescending to nearly everyone he came into contact with, he couldn’t stand it when anyone, least of all Sasha, condescended to him.

            “I’m here to help.”

            “Because you don’t want to get deported.”

            “Mainly because I don’t want to get deported.”

            He looked directly into Sasha’s eyes and said, “Anyway, going to propose to Giuseppina in a few weeks and I’m looking for books about engagement rings.” This piqued Sasha’s interest; Arthur had briefly mentioned proposing to Giuseppina a couple of times in the past month or so, but to date he had never said anything that cemented when or how he would do it. Even this came nonchalantly, as if he took his relationship or possible future engagement to Giuseppina with a grain of salt.

            “Really?”

            Arthur nodded, and added, “Maybe if I do it then Klemens will get the message, too.”

            Right. Even after all this time, Sasha still talked to Arthur about all the topics he felt that he couldn’t discuss with anyone else, one of these being how much he wanted Klemens to marry him. He had only brought it up a few times in conversation with Arthur, but the fact that Sasha wanted it, and badly, was an open secret at this point. Everyone knew at the very least that Sasha wanted nothing more than for Klemens to propose to him, Klemens included, but to date nobody had ever really spoken about it because they knew it that the likelihood of it happening anytime soon were slim at best.

            “You’re too kind.”

            “That might just be the first time that anyone’s ever said that to me.”

            On his catalog computer, Sasha quickly looked up where the books about rings were, and led Arthur to the few books that they actually had on the topic. Something about Arthur seemed to Sasha to seem a bit  _ off _ today, but he chalked it up to the excitement and apprehension of proposing marriage. Perhaps he was just imagining it, because it wasn’t often and it didn’t happen easily that something really pinched one of Arthur’s nerves to the point that he let it affect his demeanor, no matter in how small a way.

\---

            As was his habit, Sasha invited Arthur to come over to his and Klemens’s apartment for dinner that night, and because Arthur was awful at cooking because of his unwillingness to put in the effort to make anything good for himself, he accepted.

            Arthur came over a few hours later, after Sasha had made dinner, sporting two bottles of wine as usual. At about the middle of their family dinner, during a lull in their conversation in between sips of wine and spoons of soup, Klemens said, “Arthur…”, wanting to tell Arthur that he couldn’t keep on coming over for dinner every day, but considering that Arthur  _ did _ bring nice wine and that he didn’t have very many other friends, he didn’t have the heart to do it.

            “Yeah?” asked Arthur.

            Sasha cut Klemens off before he could say anything. “We both think you’re an appreciated member of this household. That’s it.”

            “Klemens, what were you planning to say?” Arthur was skeptical of Sasha’s compliment because the only people Klemens would ever say something like that to were his cat,  _ maybe _ Sasha, and  _ maybe _ his kids.

            “You’re in our house so often that you’re basically our third husband,” answered Klemens.  _ That _ sounded closer to what Arthur thought he would say. Sasha and Arthur subtly looked at each other, but upon making this brief eye contact with the other man, Sasha instantly shifted his eyes to the ground.

            “You’re not wrong.”

            “You’re not particularly chatty today, are you?”

            “When have I ever been?”

            It had been years, and Sasha still didn’t really understand the dynamics of Arthur’s and Klemens’s friendship, other than that they had both liked each other at some distant point in the past, long before either of them even knew that he existed. Now, of course, it was all water under the bridge, but Sasha still couldn’t help but wonder, to this day, how and why they were still friends.

            After Arthur left, Klemens sighed, exasperated. “Why do you always invite people over for dinner?”

            “It’s just Arthur,” answered Sasha. “He brings good wine every time he comes over.” Which was twice a week at the very least. It was their suspicion that Arthur spent all of the money that he saved on groceries on that wine.

            “We just don’t spend a lot time together alone anymore.”

            “We never have.”

            Klemens looked away. “You’re right.” They had never spent a lot of time alone together, not before and not now. Spending days and hours alone together simply was not something that they did, because Klemens was all but married to his work, and Sasha couldn’t stand to be alone. He used to love having time to himself simply to think and unfold, but now the idea of loneliness made him shudder.

            He continued, “We should spend more time together. We don’t have forever, you know.” Although sometimes it certainly seemed like it.

            “We could rent a tandem bicycle, or… get my furniture from the storage, or whatever it is that adults do.”

            Klemens stepped forward and kissed Sasha lightly. “You really want that furniture, don’t you?”

            “We could do something else. We don’t go out much, do we? We’re too domestic.”

            “I wouldn’t rather be not-married to anyone else in the world.”

            Sasha changed the subject. Despite himself, he didn’t like it when Klemens got all sentimental on him, because it felt fake. “Is it just me,” he started, “or did Arthur seem even more… than he usually is?”

            “Even more what? Disinterested?”

            “No, just  _ more _ .”

            Klemens shrugged. “If he was  _ more _ than usual, I didn’t notice.”

            “Maybe it’s just because he’s proposing to Giuseppina, but…”

            “Wait, what?” He had, like Sasha, heard Arthur mention  _ maybe _ proposing to her in passing a few times, but this was the first he was hearing about Arthur’s actually going through with it. His tone shifted from critical to genuinely concerned. “When? And do you think he’s actually going to go through with it?”

            “I think that he really wants to marry her. But I don’t… think it’s going to work out. I can’t really imagine Arthur being married, and they live three hours apart, and some other stuff.”

            “Either one of them is going to break of the engagement, or they’re getting divorced,” he announced.

            “Why do you say that?”

            “I did some research when I was getting divorced, and two-thirds of mixed-orientation marriages end with divorce.”

            “So you think that the  _ only _ reason that it’s not going to work out is because of Arthur’s orientation?” Sometimes Sasha was genuinely astounded by Klemens’s ability to make incredibly homophobic statements without even the tiniest shred of self-awareness. He wondered if Klemens was aware that their relationship was also a mixed-orientation relationship.

            “There are other reasons, like the fact that Arthur just seems unsuitable for marriage, but that’s still a factor.”

\---

Late that night, when even Klemens was asleep, Sasha received a phone call from his younger brother, Kostya. The two of them hardly spoke, so to Sasha, it appeared out of the blue, and he wondered if his brother had called him by accident. If it was nearly midnight here, then it would have been around eight in the morning in Saint Petersburg. He hesitantly answered his phone.

“Hello?” Sasha asked. “Kostya?” He hadn’t spoken any Russian in months, and he feared that he would struggle to find the right words even to converse with his brother.

“ _Oh, good, I didn’t think you would be awake,”_ said Kostya.

“So, why are you calling me?”

“ _I wanted to know if I could come over.”_

It came out of the blue. Sasha had never before considered the possibility of his brother visiting him. “What do you mean, ‘ _I wanted to know if I could come over’_? Are you coming to Canada sometime soon?”

“ _I’m coming around the end of January for a work thing. I still need to apply for a visa in everything, but all in all, I’ll probably come. And in any case, it’ll be nice to visit America for the first time.”_

“And you’re coming to Québec?”

“ _Well, I’ll be in Montréal for a few days, but if I can stay with you, I’m planning on taking a longer time off.”_

“Cool, cool.” Despite himself and despite the bad blood that there had been between him and Kostya in the past, Sasha was already excited to see his brother again, even though his plans were still tentative. “You can meet my friends, and you can finally see the city that I live in. It’ll be nice, I promise.”

“ _Can I meet your boyfriend?”_

“We live together, so if you come, you’ll probably be seeing a lot of him.”

“ _You know, I think that it’ll be nice to get out of Saint Petersburg for a change and to just not be around our family anymore. It’s too depressing_.” Kostya referred to the fact that in the past few years alone, they had lost their father and two of their sisters.

Sasha, however, was finally beyond the point of sacrificing his emotions to people who no longer cared about him. He absentmindedly rubbed at his sunflower tattoo on his left shoulder, beneath his shirt. “You know,” he said, “if there’s one thing that we Romanovs are really good at, it’s dying.”

And Kostya for once, having witnessed his fair share of premature Romanov deaths, couldn’t argue. Those with their blood had the unmistakable, if regrettable, tendency to die young and suddenly. In a rare moment of good spirits, the two brothers continued to talk about their lives until Sasha eventually fell asleep on the phone call without realizing that everything he imagined was a hallucination and that none of it bore even the slightest resemblance to reality.

The first few times that Sasha had slept in this house, he woke up in the morning relieved that his nightmares of broken porcelain and his father’s anger did not reflect his reality and merely played out in his sleep, but now he hardly remembered his dreams— if, indeed, he dreamt at all. Most nights, like tonight, he simply fell into a dreamless torpor when he least expected it and awoke from that darkness as if it had never happened. Tonight, he slept uncomfortably in an armchair that wasn’t meant for sleeping, much less for someone of his stature, and drifted in and out of sleep as the night progressed.

‘ _It’s cold,’_ he mused at one moment, awakening briefly before falling back asleep. And another time, ‘ _Where has Leo gone?’_ before he remembered that those days were long over. Where was Leo?

He awoke the next morning with another start, opening his eyes and seeing the bright sunlight seep in through the translucent drapes. Some days he still jolted awake, thinking that he still worked at _La République_ and that he was already late for his typical morning shift, but those days were long past, thank god. Checking his wristwatch, he found that he didn’t have to be at work for another two hours, and that this was around the time that he normally woke up, anyway.

The lights in the kitchen were already turned on, which meant that Klemens had already set about having his breakfast, and while Sasha was in the process of getting up from his horribly uncomfortable position, he called out, “Klemens?”

“Sasha,” he heard faintly, “I thought you were dead.” What a hell of a way to say good morning.

Sasha couldn’t tell whether Klemens was being serious or not. “Unfortunately for you, I’m not dead.” He thought back to what he had said yesterday and to what Klemens had said yesterday. “ _If there’s one thing the Romanovs are really good at, it’s dying.” “We don’t have forever, you know.”_

“Why were you asleep in the living room?”

With the added difficulty of just having woken up, Sasha made his way to the kitchen, where he found Klemens making him buckwheat porridge with milk, which was unusual for Klemens.

“Good morning,” he said.

Sasha leaned against the kitchen counter a few feet away from the stove, and said, “So my brother called me yesterday night, and I fell asleep while talking to him.”

“What did he say?”

“He’s coming to Canada in January for a work thing, and he’s staying with us for a few days.”

“Do you know when?”

“He said that he’ll be coming at around the end of January and that it’s too depressing in Saint Petersburg because we keep dying and probably because the sun is never out.”

“Well, that’s good. Not the dying thing, but that we’ll be in town at the same time.” Klemens had long wanted to meet Sasha’s only relevant sibling, but he always tried to spend the winter holidays with his daughter and son in Vienna, so he was concerned about whether his absence and Sasha’s brother’s visit would overlap.

“You know, I really hate the fact that both of us are European sometimes.” This came out of nowhere, and surprised Klemens. Then again, perhaps it shouldn’t have, because Sasha _always_ got weird whenever he had to deal with family stuff, and understandably.

“There are much worse things than to be European.”

“It’s just that if I was from here, everything would be so much easier, because talking to my brother made me think about how removed I am from everything that goes on in that hemisphere, even though I sort of belong there.”

He sighed. “To be completely fair, you decided to move here. And so did I, and it worked out, more or less.”

Sasha wanted to tell Klemens that he would never know what it was like to stay attached to a place that didn’t need him and where no one loved him anymore, that for some people it was impossible to coexist in what seemed like two separate universes, that Klemens would never know what it was like to not be invited to his own sister’s funeral, but he didn’t say any of it. Now was not the time or the place for that conversation, and it seemed like it never would be. He simply said quietly, “It’s still hard sometimes,” to which Klemens replied, “I know it is.”

It wasn’t the same. It never got easier. Over time, Sasha thought less and less about what it would have been like to have stayed in Saint Petersburg, but every time that someone or something that he thought belonged in the past confronted him like this, the pain returned stronger than ever. Being able to speak to his brother yesterday like brothers was nice— pleasant, even— but it still made him return to this, and he couldn’t help but wonder if there was just something wrong with him.

After a long pause, he said, “I think I’m going to call in sick to work today.”

Klemens looked into Sasha’s eyes. “Are you alright? Are you feeling sick?”

“No, I just didn’t sleep very well last night, I think.”

“Okay.” He poured the porridge from the pot on the stove into a bowl, and added butter to it. “I love you, you know. Call me if you need anything, okay?”

“Okay. I love you.” Sasha kissed Klemens on the cheek, and Klemens, untying his apron and grabbing his briefcase, left to go to work.

Then, Sasha was alone for the next nine hours. As he spooned his porridge into his mouth he closed his eyes and daydreamed, returning to his long-abandoned fantasy about being the tsar of the Russian Empire. It was a world that he hadn’t visited for so long that he had nearly forgotten it existed in the first place. It was silly, he was well-aware, but the charming fantasy of being nineteenth-century European heads of state had always been something sacred that he and Leo had shared when they had still been together. He wondered if Leo ever went back to the vision of Imperial France that he had created in his mind, and felt a pang of nostalgia for times which were so long gone.

No. He couldn’t think about this. The fact that he still sometimes missed Leo was another thing that he tried to block out of his mind at all times possible.

Despite their occasional disagreements and bickering, Sasha was happy with Klemens, and his life was better now, more stable, than it ever had been before. He had lost so much of the characteristic softness which defined him a few long years ago that whereas others had been able to read him like a book before, now even he sometimes had trouble connecting the lines between his emotions.

So why was he like this today? And why had that phone call, of all things, penetrated to the very core of his being and made him reflect seriously on the person he had become? This was more than the normal weirdness that overcame him whenever he had to deal with family stuff, and there seemed to be no rhyme or reason to it. The sudden, unexpected, and unprecedented burst of emotion seemed to him to be indecipherable.

\---

By the end of the day, Sasha had gone back to his usual self, and had spent the entire afternoon completing some much-needed organization of the house, dusting and vacuuming the rooms which they seldom entered. All in all, it had been a productive day, even if he couldn’t seem to find it in him to leave the house during that entire time. On that day, Klemens came home an hour early, which was unexpected.

“Why are you home so early?” Sasha asked him upon his arrival.

“There was a meeting that ended early. Are you feeling any better than you were this morning?”

“A lot better,” he nodded.

“Are you sure?”

“You know, I say that twenty-two-year-old Sasha was an idiot, and he was, but I sometimes believe that he’s still in me, somewhere. But now, I’m fine, I really am.”

He reached out with both arms, held Sasha’s hands, and pulled him closer. “Were you just perturbed by talking to your brother?”

“We just talked about a few things that brought back bad memories, and that’s it. Really bad memories.”

Klemens remembered. He was there for part of the memories that Sasha referred to. He recalled a shadowy vision of the other man crying, sobbing into him as if there was no quiver of warmth or light left in him. What he remembered most vividly was when Sasha begged him over and over again to marry him, and he had no choice but to deny him. Despicable memories that had become fundamental to who they both were. “That night?” he asked, and they both knew which night he was referring to.

“…Yeah.” Nothing else needed to be said on the matter, and both of them were quiet for a moment.

“Do you want to go somewhere?”

“Where?”

He kissed Sasha on the corner of his mouth. “It’s a surprise. Just… take comfortable shoes, and sunscreen, and mosquito repellent, and all of the other outdoorsy stuff, and meet me at the car in five minutes.”

“Okay.” Sasha had no idea where Klemens was going to take him.

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Discussion question: Is Sasha actually changed at all? Has Klemens changed at all?
> 
> Comments are cool. Please comment.


	4. The Room Seemed to Spin

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Arthur took Giuseppina by the hand, knelt down, took a ring from his pocket, and asked her to marry him. She said yes, cheerfully, and the two of them were officially engaged. Giuseppina called her family in Italy to share the news with them, and Arthur called his mother and his friends back home to tell them that he had proposed to a girl and that she had said yes, and that yes, he was finally going to get married after thirty-four years of refusing to settle down.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm back :-)

Sasha heard the sound of rushing water, but because of the blindfold that Klemens made him wear to ascertain that he wouldn’t know where they were going, he didn’t yet know the source. He had practically begged Klemens to let him take the blindfold off when it came to ascending and descending stairs, but no, it wasn’t allowed. With patience and dedication, Klemens led him down every single damn stair, and now Sasha heard the rushing of the water beneath him and felt tiny flecks of the liquid hit his face, but he still had no idea where he was.

“Sasha,” Klemens finally said, after what seemed like more than a few moments of hesitation.

“Can I take it off? I hear water… are you going to push me?”

He smiled, although Sasha couldn’t see it. “No, I’m not going to push you, but take the blindfold off. Take it off.” And slowly, letting his eyes adjust to the bright light of the outdoors, pushing his glasses back into place, Sasha took off the blindfold.

For all of the beautiful places he had ever been to and that he had ever seen, none compared to the Canyon Sainte-Anne. Gushes of white, rapidly-flowing water flowed over the river-smoothed stones of the ravine. The roar of the canyon drowned out any outside noise, until all Sasha could focus on was the erratic nature of the rapids and the warmth he felt from Klemens, who stood next to him and watched him take in every detail. Covered in thick clouds, the sky was varied shades of white and grey, like the water, but this monotony enhanced the natural, untouched beauty of the emerald foliage and the evergreens on either side of the river. Sasha didn’t think he had ever seen anything so green as those trees seemed. On the hanging bridge where he and Klemens stood, side by side, over the flow of the river, he felt as if he could have spent a lifetime or two, just watching the stream rush past him and feeling not as if the canyon existed for him, but as if he existed solely to be here right now.

For a minute, he said nothing to Klemens, and Klemens, who seemed equally mesmerized by the overwhelming pulchritude of his surroundings, said nothing to him. The two of them stood alone on that bridge, hand in hand, for what felt like hours but wasn’t even a single second in the Earth’s perception of time. A single tear rolled down Sasha’s cheek and eventually fell in the water.

\---

Another two weeks passed, and now it was nearing the end of July. Once again, for his part time hand modelling career, Leo drove the three hours it took to get to Montreal. However, this time, he did not stay with Giuseppina and Georgina. For the frequency at which he had once stayed the night in their apartment, the two women refused to accept any sort of payment despite Leo’s insistence that he do something for them in return. Of course, any time he was over at their apartment, he helped with chores, such as washing the dishes, dusting their furniture (when no one was looking, of course), and vacuuming, but it never felt like he was doing _enough_. The feeling that someone was helping him without him having anything to offer _irked_ him deeply, and that was why he decided to stay the night with François Joseph Talma this time.

It was a fact at this point that Leo simply worked too much, and all of the people he admired were those who worked even harder and even better than he did on a day-to-day basis. However, if there was a single quality for which Leo resented François, it was François’s equally impeccable work ethic, because it meant that it was rare that they could ever find a few spare hours to spend together, even if Leo was staying in the other man’s home. There was hardly anyone in the world whose company Leo enjoyed as much as he enjoyed that of François, and sometimes he came to wondering if this was so simply because of the sparsity at which they were able to meet, even though his instincts told him otherwise.

Even now, during this visit, the only time during which Leo and his dear friend were able to spend any meaningful time together that day was during an hour or so at night, when they both sipped wine in François’s parlor and tried to imagine that the hour they had together spanned over dozens of millennia.

François was about average height and of medium build. His face remained spry and youthful despite the fact that he was in his early forties, and his short, dark chestnut-colored hair perfectly framed the roundness of his face and complemented the darkness of his eyes. Somewhere, in his heart of hearts, Leo thought that he was beautiful, and he knew it, too.

François was an actor. Although nobody knew it, Leo was an actor, too. He was really good at convincing both himself and others that what he felt for François was nothing but a deep, meaningful sense of amity. That he wasn’t slowly falling in love with Talma, more and more every time that they met.

“It’s a shame that we couldn’t meet the last time you were in Montreal,” François said to Leo, swirling his wine around and around his round glass. “I was in London. You know how it is.” He was constantly dropping everything and heading to Paris or London for weeks or even months at a time if he was working on a production.

Leo stared at the pale red wash that François’s wine left on the sides of glass every time he swirled it around. “Don’t worry, I get it,” he said. They had had this discussion before. Leaving your heart behind to pursue the rest of your life. It was one thing that they both had in common.

“I don’t know why I keep spending more and more time abroad. I think that I’m just too lonely in Montréal.” Three years ago, François had divorced his wife of fourteen years for some reason that he never disclosed to anyone, other than that it simply had to happen. Leo didn’t know much about the situation other than that he also had two fourteen-year-old twin sons from whom he had become estranged, and even this Leo only knew because he had found it out by accident, through Giuseppina. He had kindly asked her to never tell him anything about François’s personal life ever again.

“That’s the reason that I keep on coming to Montreal, for the weekends, for whatever. Sometimes I’m just too lonely in Quebec City. The only time in my life that I’ve lived alone has been for the past couple of years, and, well, I don’t like it. My younger sister moved out to go to college, and then this guy I dated for a while left, and since then I’ve just been on my own.”

François had no idea that Leo was bisexual, and although it wasn’t necessarily something that Leo wanted everyone to know about him, he didn’t try to hide it because he just assumed that everyone already knew.

“You learn a lot about yourself when you live alone for the first time.”

“That’s the exact thing I don’t like about living alone. All I’ve learned from living alone is that I spent years trying to make other people comfortable, but on the inside, I’m an absolute selfish bastard.”

“Somehow, I can’t think of you as a selfish bastard, and if you are one, then I’m one, too.”

“Oh, really?”

For some reason, in that moment, he trusted Leo and divulged, “My ex-wife divorced me because it’s my fault that she’s going to die deeply in debt.”

Leo paused a second before he spoke. He couldn’t believe he was about to say this. “I had an affair with my next-door neighbor, let him fall in love with me, and broke his heart for no other reason than that I could.”

Taking a moment to digest this information, François held up his almost-empty wine glass as a toast. He smiled. “We’re both such awful people.”

Naturally, Leo clinked his glass against his friend’s and began to drink.

\---

Arthur took Giuseppina by the hand, knelt down, took a ring from his pocket, and asked her to marry him. She said yes, cheerfully, and the two of them were officially engaged. Giuseppina called her family in Italy to share the news with them, and Arthur called his mother and his friends back home to tell them that he had proposed to a girl and that she had said yes, and that _yes_ , he was finally going to get married after thirty-four years of refusing to settle down.

His friends and family couldn’t believe that _Arthur_ , the playboy, was actually getting married. Back when he lived in Dublin and London, it seemed as if he had a new girlfriend every week, a mere plaything for him to amuse himself with for a few days and then forget about. When he spent half of a year in Spain, he had so many drug-fueled one-night stands that he resorted to calling all of his sexual partners, “ _Mi Hermosa,”_ because he couldn’t remember their names. He cringed whenever he remembered these parts of his life and wished that his sorry ass hadn’t treated the women in his life as poorly as he had when he was younger.

That first night, in Arthur’s apartment, he and Giuseppina excitedly discussed all there was to discuss on a preliminary basis— when they would marry, in which country they would marry, and what their prospective futures would be like together. On the outside, Arthur appeared as excited as Giuseppina was, which was a rare phenomenon, but on the inside, nothing about the day had sunk in yet. He couldn’t believe that he was going to marry her, and while they discussed and slept together for the first time as fiancés, he kept on gazing at her face, her eyes, and her lips as he tried to fall more deeply in love with her.

There was no doubt in his mind that he loved Giuseppina dearly and that he felt the utmost affection for her and for everything she had given him, but he knew— he _knew_ — that she deserved better. It was simply impossible for Arthur to love Giuseppina as much as he had loved _others_ in his shrouded and impossible past, not anymore.

‘ _I am settling,’_ he thought, trying to push the thought out of his mind and finding it impossible. ‘ _I am settling for a gorgeous and talented woman who I love and who loves me, but I’m settling. Just because I want to get married. And Giuseppina deserves better.’_

The next morning, in between taking phone calls to congratulate their engagement and waiting for the next one, Giuseppina asked Arthur what was wrong.

            “You have a strange look on your face,” she told him. “I don’t know what it is, and I’ve never seen it before, but something about the way you’ve been looking at me and the way you’ve been talking to everyone about us being engaged strikes me as… different.” Giuseppina wasn’t an idiot, and her uncanny ability to read other people’s minds told her that that  _ look _ on Arthur’s face was none other than that of doubt.

            He decided to be honest with her, but in the most deceptive way possible. “It’s…” he wasn’t used to talking about his feelings for other people in any capacity, but if there was ever a time to start trying, it was now. “I don’t really know how to describe it. It’s that feeling when you wake up in the morning next to a gorgeous woman, and you really realize, for the first time, that you’re going to marry her. It’s the first time you really start thinking of the future, and it makes you feel like you’re going insane, because you’ve never had to really think about or worry about the future before.”

            Giuseppina raised an eyebrow. “What are you saying?”

            “I can’t believe we’re getting married. In a good way, of course, but I never really thought of myself as the type of person who would ever get married, and it sounds like nobody I ever knew in Great Britain did, either. It’s like, for the first time, I’m pushing my boundaries, and it feels good, but different.”

            “Okay.”

            “Is that how you feel?” Wow. Arthur not only described his own feelings, but asked someone else how they felt as well. Today was one for the books.

            “I don’t know,” she answered. “I feel ecstatic, but maybe that’s not the right word. My mom never wanted me to be an actress because she said that actresses don’t get married.”

            “ _ Yeah, and showing your ankles is a capital offense,” _ muttered Arthur.

            “She’s old fashioned, okay?”

            “Didn’t your mom train you to be an actress, though?”

            Giuseppina shook her head. “No, she trained me to be a musician. So going into acting was my way of rebelling as an adolescent.”

            “You know, that worked out surprisingly well for you. I just joined a band and did a lot of drugs when I was younger.” He smiled, turned towards Giuseppina, and kissed her on the cheek. “You’re too responsible. You turned your teenage rebellion into a successful career. Really, who does that?”

            “You could have been a successful musician if you hadn’t, I don’t know, burned your guitar and violins.” She looked at Arthur for a second before leaning against him and placing her head on his shoulder. “I don’t know. My mom was a violinist, and I don’t know if I’d ever want to date one, let alone marry one.”

            “Maybe it ended up being a good choice when I decided to become boring and do math for a living instead.” For a moment, Arthur felt the true, passionate feeling that he had once held for Giuseppina flare up, but it quickly died down again.

            Contrary to popular belief, Arthur didn’t simply hate Leo because he had let him down after they had been fucking for three months. Arthur hated him because he felt, within the core of his being, that he would never be able to truly love anyone again for more than a few moments at a time. Leo had robbed that from him, and for that, he couldn’t help but remain resentful.

\---

Giuseppina wasn’t really friends with Sasha or Klemens anymore, given the way that their actions had lodged a leaden arrow into Leo’s heart, so they waited until she finally left Arthur’s apartment to congratulate Arthur on his engagement.

“So,” Klemens said to Sasha as they drove downtown to Arthur’s apartment, “Arthur’s getting married. That’s a thing, somehow.”

“You really don’t sound happy for him, at all.” Sasha wasn’t surprised by this sentiment, somehow.

“I just think that in the case that he invites us to his wedding, things will be a little bit awkward, given that the bride doesn’t like us.”

“That’s an understatement.”

“You know it, I know it, and Arthur knows it. Giuseppina would love to tear our throats out.”

Rolling his eyes, Sasha corrected him, “Giuseppina would love to tear _your_ throat out. You, specifically, because of the way that you treated your ex-wife. She definitely doesn’t like me, either, but I think that she pities me, if anything.”

“Her pitying you, Sasha, is arguably worse than her wanting to tear your throat out.”

Sasha thought that perhaps, out of all of them, Giuseppina was the only sane one, because she was the only one willing to shun either himself or Klemens based on their actions. He secretly lauded her propensity to actually care about the people around her, even if it meant no longer being his friend. It was what he would have wanted his own friends to do if someone betrayed him like he had betrayed Leo.

“I don’t think I agree with that sentiment.” If there was one thing that Sasha _really_ didn’t like about men, including Klemens, is that they were all too proud and too obsessed with the idea of self-reliance to see past the most superficial layer of human emotion. “But I miss her sometimes. We were never really good friends, and the only times I saw her was when she was with you, or other people, but she always seemed like a good friend. She and Leo and Caroline always talked in Italian when she came over, and I never could understand what anyone was saying, but they always looked so much calmer and more relieved afterward. I’m really happy for Arthur and Giuseppina. They’re both good people who deserve a shot at happiness together.”

That was the end of that conversation, because they had had it so many times before.

When they reached Arthur’s apartment, about ten minutes later, Sasha hugged Arthur and Klemens settled with an enthusiastic handshake.

“Congratulations, man, you’re getting married!” he exclaimed. He knew what it was like, the feeling of being newly-engaged to a woman he loved, and remembering the bliss of the first few days that he had been engaged to his now-ex-wife brought back all of the memories of her that he thought he would never relive again.

“Did you guys come all the way to my apartment just to congratulate me on my engagement?” Arthur tried not to smile, but failed. Not even he was able to mask his happiness in that moment.

“Obviously,” said Sasha. He handed the bottle of champagne that he had brought to Arthur, and Arthur promptly popped open the bottle and fetched three glasses from his kitchen.

They drank the champagne in Arthur’s living room, if it could be called that, given the man’s spartan lifestyle. Sasha sat with his arm around Klemens, facing Arthur. At that point, Sasha had been sober for over a year and he only really drank the champagne for ceremonial purposes, and similarly, Arthur only partook in a couple of glasses. Klemens, on the other hand and against his better judgment, drank enough that he felt a warm and fuzzy feeling inside, and coupled with the warmth emanating from Sasha, it was enough to make him drowsy. He almost instantly fell asleep, but when he tried to rest his head in Sasha’s lap, Sasha pushed him back up against his shoulder. He tried again, but with the same result, and finally resorted to using Sasha’s shoulder as a pillow when he napped. It wasn’t the first time that Klemens had gotten tipsy and taken a nap to avoid interaction, and it wouldn’t be the last, either. While this happened, Arthur watched them both, deeply amused.

“Shut up,” Sasha told him when he noticed the staring.

In response, Arthur said, very quietly, “You guys are cute together.”

“Where is the old, cynical Arthur and what have you done with him?”

“Why is your boyfriend asleep?”

Sasha looked at the sleeping Klemens on his shoulder, and then back at Arthur, and shrugged. “He said he had to deal with a merger or something today and that it was incredibly fatiguing, but I don’t really know.”

Sometimes Arthur thought that Sasha, although he was quite intelligent, didn’t really understand what Klemens actually did for a living and didn’t care to, either. This was one of those moments, and it was shocking considering the frequency at which Klemens talked about his job.

They talked for a while longer about absolutely nothing of importance, Sasha occasionally taking a glance at Klemens and making sure that he was comfortable.

“My brother’s coming to Canada in January, apparently,” he told Arthur.

“Konstantin Pavlovitch Romanov?”

“Yeah, that one. Do you want to meet him?”

“Does he know who I am?”

“He knows you as my hot British friend.”

Arthur shifted his eyes onto the sleeping Klemens, as if to say, “ _Klemens is_ here _, you idiot_.”

“I sent him a picture of you once, just because he wanted to know what my friends look like, and he said something which I think translates into ‘ _Oh, shit, he’s hot_.’ Kostya is _completely_ straight, by the way.”

“I’m flattered, but also disgusted. Wait, what does your brother look like?”

It took Sasha a few seconds to find a picture of Kostya on his cell phone, and when he did, he promptly showed it to Arthur. Arthur looked from the picture to Sasha and back at the picture.

“You look exactly the same,” he declared.

“Yeah, it might have something to do with the fact that we share the same gene pool.”

“But…”

“But what?”

He tried to think of a non-offensive way to say this, but there seemed to be none. “You know, he looks more…” he said, making a vague gesture with one of his hands. He gave up. “Your brother looks like he tries really hard to be as masculine as possible.”

“He does,” shrugged Sasha. “I think that he tries really hard to be not like me.”

“Me and my brother are the same.” Arthur smiled. “He’s a good man, but god, he’s an asshole.”

“It runs in the family, I see.”

“Go fuck yourself.”

“You’ve proved my point.” Sasha paused, stood up, and grabbed his empty glass. “I’ll be right back.” He gently shook Klemens awake.

“ _How long have I been asleep?”_ he asked as Sasha started to leave, presumably to fill his glass with more champagne.

“It hasn’t been that long. Half an hour, maybe?”

“Oh, alright.”

The moment that Sasha stepped out of the room, he leaned towards Arthur and whispered _very_ aggressively, “ _Don’t fucking get married, you idiot.”_ Or, at least, that’s what he wanted to do. Instead, when Sasha left, he simply asked Arthur, “Are you sure that you’re really going through with this? The whole marriage thing?”

“Yes, I do want to marry Giuseppina, and I don’t know _why_ everyone keeps asking me what I really want.”

“It just seems sudden. You haven’t been back together for _that_ long, after all, and it doesn’t seem like…”

“Like _what?”_

“That you have a lot figured out between you both.” As opposed to Klemens’s usual tone of scorn and condescension, this time, he sounded genuinely concerned. As if, again, he spoke from his own experience.

Arthur was quiet for a moment before saying, “We don’t. But no one else does, either.”

Klemens didn’t know what to say to that. His relationship with Arthur was based on endless sarcasm and criticism of each other, and talking about their _feelings_ or whatever simply wasn’t something that they did. On the rare instance that talk of either of their feelings _did_ enter a conversation, what had happened in the past simply made it unnecessarily awkward.

He still had that photo that he had taken a couple of months after he moved to Canada of Arthur, drunk, kissing him on the cheek. It was on a shelf in his bedroom alongside photos of his son and his daughter, and the old photo of him and Sasha on Sasha’s twenty-third birthday. Arthur hated that photo.

He closed his eyes. “What I’m trying to say is,” he said, and the words came out of his mouth _very_ slowly, “don’t fucking get married, you idiot.”

For a second, the room seemed to spin.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> please leave comments, thanks. it gives me motivation and i really appreciate it.

**Author's Note:**

> it gets better  
> find me on [twitter](https://twitter.com/ussbrandywine)  
> Comments are ALWAYS appreciated and make my entire week (not exaggerating).


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